YOU TOTALLY GET ME….

The future of marketing The future of marketing is about connecting with individual people — like you and me. We are probably very different, very busy…and very selective about where we spend our time and money. Developing evidence-based marketing initiatives that move beyond basic segmentation into true 1:1 individualization in real-time is the next big step for today’s top companies. Where do we start? Growth hacking…actionable analytics…. hybrid, fusion, velocity, democratization, cross-channel, templatize, aggregation, syndication, acceleration? Sure that sounds like a plan…actually it just sounds like a few fancy words thrown together that all seem to lead back to the three most important aspects of any marketing campaign: Understanding your CUSTOMERS. Connecting them with brand STORIES. Driving specific RESULTS. CUSTOMERS: Uncovering “Dark Data” with Audience Insights When companies are able to master true consumer individualization, customers take notice. Customers who are satisfied, delighted, and engaged with brands are customers who are inclined to continue choosing that brand experience. The more you can cater to your audience, the more you can cement the mission and intention behind your brand, and the more invested your customers will be in your products and your success. As marketers; this is our intent. We are only human however, and I find there are some common questions when it comes to creating effective marketing initiatives: How can I understand my target audience better? I already track things like page views, traffic, shares, bounce rate, and engaged time, but these metrics don’t tell my team anything about who our audience is or what they care about. I can create and publish generic brand stories, but i’m not equip with the insights needed to translate content into consumer value, and the tools we do have certainly don’t set us up for global reach and scale — how can I do this with speed and accuracy? How can we create purposeful messaging, successful social media campaigns and create audience empowerment? The foundation of smart marketing decisions start with a strong understanding of who your audience is and what they want — demographics, interests, identity, sentiment, emotion, beliefs and intent. That might seem obvious, but in reality, there’s a huge gap between the soft metrics we track today and the audience insights we really need. “Using Sentiment Analysis, Concept Expansion, Relationship Extraction, and Personality Insight APIs, we’re able to understand and extract the “dark data” that motivates a customer to take action”- Sam Wiener, Head of Sales and Strategy at Opentopic with Watson Companies like Manfrotto leverages IBM Watson’s Machine Learning Algorithms and Natural Language Processing to expose trends, concepts and keywords to inspire editorial for main business units. Using Opentopic with Watson’s Recommendation Platform, marketing teams can easily distribute meaningful stories via newsletters to drive lead gen — making smarter and faster decisions at scale. Manfrotto wants to connect with users with passion for images: from professional photographers to amateur. The add-value is an high qualified aggregation of resources to provide the users a impactful experience. The company saw an opportunity to engage with potential customers, especially on social media, before they made a buying decision. These insights will enable you to build out an Audience Profile: a real-life look into your audience’s demographics and interests, which will inform your story strategy. New and recurrent visitors match Manfrotto brand with the concept of quality. The integrated e-commerce solution is the final destination for an audience that is taken care from the brand: an exciting buyer journey to increase we-transactions and revenue. Storytelling & effective marketing processes start with strategy, creation, publishing, distribution….and analytics are thrown in at the end to determine what’s working and what’s not. STORIES: Creating meaningful messaging with Personalized Stories Brand stories & narratives are revealing a more human side of the business. They often go beyond “this is what I do here,” instead illuminating “this iswhy I do what I do — here.” Some of the biggest brands in the world have embraced the power of storytelling. Proper storytelling — whether that’s generating your own brand story or embracing influencers to sing your praises — is a powerful top-of-funnel awareness tactic. It can generate the levels of engagement for which most companies would pay handsomely. Dove leads the way with a recent project; leveraging Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning Algorithms, Dove teams up with Unilever and Opentopic with Watson to create meaningful messaging. Digital billboards aim to engage users via social media using the hashtag #MyBeautyMySay. “I feel like our world today is pushing beauty over athleticism for young girls, I want to be an advocate to change that.” — Shawn Johnson, Former gymnast and Olympic gold medalist. When a user clicks on a quote, they are able to automatically send Dove’s tweet to the media outlet or person it came from.This real-time engagement gives consumers the feeling that they are able to make a real difference. On Twitter Dove is sharing graphics, facts and quotes from media sources that are judgmental of female athletes. Dove is also inviting women to share their own motivational stories via the hashtag #mybeautymysay This social media campaign comes full circle at the “Have Your Say” website, which offers interactive content, statistics, and a list of negative tweets that visitors can click on and reply to. RESULTS: Guide customers down a highly targeted buyer funnel with a cognitive understanding of what content produces ROI Now that we have uncovered our true target audience, leveraged cognitive computing to gain business intelligence, created meaningful stories to connect and engage — we need to serve it all up at the right time to drive a specific transaction goal. Audience insights — Start by segmenting your readership into micro target audiences based on your own user data or the insights provided by our analysis. Once that’s accomplished, truly understanding them becomes the easy part — sentiment and personality analysis, concept and entity extraction, categorization and taxonomy — best of breed cognitive technology to get the job done. Dynamic hubs — Through our integration with leading marketing automation systems we are able to produce fully dynamic hubs to your readers without requiring you to make any changes to your existing infrastructure. Lead & Transactional Goals — Opentopic with Watson is built to optimize customers & stories for a result — your lead & transaction goal. We are able to track a specific CTA and, using sophisticated machine learning algorithms, learn over time what customers and what stories work. Continuously and automatically improving on the fly. The Economist offers authoritative insight and opinion on international news, politics, business, finance, science, technology and the connection between them. The goal of this personalization campaign with The Economist is to drive subscriptions for specific target audiences in an automated and smart way. Using Opentopic’s cognitive technology, The Economist leverages a dynamic webpage with individualized content blocks that are optimized in real-time. Consumer segmentation is achieved by a powerful taxonomy and acquisition made through paid channels. Defined target audiences based on a cognitive understanding of their interests, demographics, and behaviors Defined metrics: engagement (UV, PV), leads (CTR for subscription banner), transaction (subscriptions) Personalized content that leverage auto-publishing rules and machine learning algorithms When will you connect your CUSTOMERS + STORIES = RESULTS?